Olimex founder Tsvetan Usunov has introduced a brand new characteristic for the corporate’s speedy RT1010Py MicroPython growth board: a port of the TinyUF2 bootloader for drag-and-drop firmware flashing.
“Robert Hammelrath did wonderful job by including [a] usbtinyuf2 bootloader to it, so now you may substitute the MicroPython firmware by easy drag and drop such as you do on [Raspberry Pi] Pico,” Usunov explains of the board’s new characteristic. “We’ll ship all RT1010Py any longer with usbtinyuf2 bootloader.”
Olimex’s Tsvetan Usunov has introduced a TinyUF2 port for the RT1010Py MicroPython board, for simple drag-and-drop firmware set up. (📷: Olimex/MicroPython)
The corporate launched the RT1010Py again in November 2023, as what Usunov known as its “quickest board working MicroPython” — because of the NXP Semiconductors MIMXRT1011DAE5A “crossover” microcontroller at its coronary heart. The chip’s 500MHz Arm Cortex-M7 core offers, Usunov says, round 4 instances the efficiency of the Raspberry Pi RP2040 on an earlier Olimex MicroPython board design, whereas an optionally available “devkit” provider board added USB Sort-C energy, two UEXT connectors, and two mains-voltage relays to the breadboard-friendly growth board’s capabilities.
The brand new bootloader does nothing to spice up the efficiency nonetheless additional, however does make it so it is simpler to load new firmware onto the board. Simply double-click the on-board RESET button and the microcontroller will load UF2 mode — showing to the host working system to be a surprisingly low-capacity USB Mass Storage System. Drag and drop any appropriate UF2-format firmware to this drive, and it’ll immediately disappear because the board flashes the firmware and masses it on reboot.
Directions on flashing and utilizing the brand new bootloader can be found on the MicroPython web site, whereas boards with the bootloader pre-loaded can be found from the Olimex retailer priced at €15 (round $16.50) every; the board design recordsdata can be found on GitHub beneath the permissive Apache 2.0 license.
